Stable tag will be slipped Sunday and release engineering will begin Monday

[Rahul Siddharthan]

walt wrote:
>To repeat myself:  I certainly have no objection to pkgsrc as a tool for
>building and installing third-party applications.  But -- in its present
>incarnation as the package *maintenance* tool of NetBSD it can't hold a
>candle to FreeBSD's portupgrade.

What can't pkgsrc do that portupgrade can?

>that any move to pkgsrc will really make life easier for the average DFly
>user who just wants to update his gnome desktop while chugging a beer.

"cd /usr/pkgsrc/meta-pkgs/gnome && bmake update" ?

I haven't used pkgsrc long enough to tell all its warts.  One problem
of course is that some packages don't build or need some handholding
to build.  But if it becomes more widely used under DFly, that problem
should reduce, and it's not like that never happens under FreeBSD's
ports: in fact, unbuildable packages happen way too often on FreeBSD
itself.

>(I think that should be a major criterion for any package maintenance
>system, BTW  ;o)

Debian's apt system.  If you have a broadband connection, you don't
need to chug any beers, the whole system is upgraded in minutes.
Recently I moved my desktop at work from Debian-sid to Ubuntu-hoary (a
Debian-based distribution but with a completely different set of
packages), and it went like a breeze, "apt-get update && apt-get
dist-upgrade"; the only minor hitch was in the upgrade from XFree86 to
Xorg, the "xfree86-common" package had to be manually removed and once
I did that the rest of the upgrade just went ahead without missing a
step.  It's mindblowing.  

Similarly, if one doesn't upgrade the system for 10 months, "apt-get
upgrade" or "apt-get dist-upgrade" just *works*, you rapidly have an
uptodate system.  On any BSD, portupgrade or not, it's a royal pain.
A fresh install is easier.

One thing apt/dpkg can't do is let different versions of the same
package coexist, as pkgsrc can.  Nevertheless, I think anyone aiming
to improve BSD packaging should spend a few weeks using apt, just to
see what the benchmark is elsewhere on the planet.

R